Delighted to see the interest in the technology behind podbazaar.com. Yes, we are indeed using Common Lisp to build the entire application. As an when time permits, I will try to write more about our system design as well as how we’ve leveraged Lisp in our application.

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at Will Gozer’s blog on the development of CafeSpot.net, another web application written entirely in Common Lisp (http://cafespot-dev.blogspot.com/). We were certainly impressed and inspired by his work.

I guess the short answer is, Lisp is what we were most proficient with.

I did play with “Ruby on Rails” a while back, and found it interesting, but not compelling enough. Besides, when it comes to building extensible abstractions, nothing beats Lisp; the power of Lisp macros becomes abundantly evident when building web apps and web services (check out Will Glozer’s blog entry on Syntactic Abstraction at http://cafespot-dev.blogspot.com/2005/08/syntactic-abstraction.html).

Also, the fact that SBCL has a native optimizing compiler and support for native threads were important considerations in our decision as well.

I believe the information that Yahoo! Stores doesn’t use Lisp is false. They still do, according to relatively recent information. They replaced as much as they could with C++ because they were ‘afraid of Lisp’. Here’s a nice write-up about what happened after Yahoo! bought ViaWeb: